Page 11 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Foreword
Somewhat over a hundred years ago, there occurred a striking synchronicity in the visu- al arts between the rise of modernism (prepared for, it could be argued, by Impression- ism) and the rediscovery of the Orthodox icon (both Byzantine and Russian). This syn- chronicity can be characterized (if not accounted for) by these two events (or move- ments) having in common the rejection of a tradition, then long customary in Western art, of realism (or naturalism), the beginnings of which can be found in the Italian trecen- to. Modernism challenged this convention, while Orthodox iconography represented the tradition from which Giotto and others had departed. This affinity rapidly manifested itself in the interest shown in the icon by early Modernists, especially Russians such as Kandinsky, Goncharova, Malevich, and later, the American artist of Latvian origin, Mark Rothko. The Orthodox icon tradition had stood in need of being recovered, however, for it had been virtually lost, both literally and by being abandoned: literally, in that, by the late nineteenth century, icons in churches had been covered by centuries of soot from the icon lamps and incense by which they had been venerated, and which had rendered them dark and gloomy; furthermore, attempts to ‘restore’ them by over-painting could no longer follow the traditional way of painting icons, which had been all but abandoned in favour of Western traditions of art. It was the discovery of how icons could be cleaned— initially quite abrasively, nearly destroying what it had been the intention to reveal—that snatched icons from the oblivion caused by centuries of use, and revealed the brightness in their use of colour. This revelation was displayed for the public in an exhibition of Old Religious Art, which opened in Moscow in 1913, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. This revealed both the ‘high aesthetic quality’ of ancient Russian ico- nography, as well as ‘the liveliness of its colouring’, as the art historian, Oleg Tarasov, has put it.1 In an early reaction to this revelation of the radiance of early Russian icons,
1 Oleg Tarasov, ‘Russian Icons and the Avant-Garde: Tradition and Change’, in The Art of Holy Russia (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1998), 93–99, at 97.
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